| This book offers Java developers short, focused pieces of code that are easy to incorporate into other programs. The idea is to focus on things that are useful, tricky, or both. The book's code segments cover all of the dominant APIs and should serve as a great "jumpingoff place" for Java developers who want to get started in areas outside their specialization.
In a sense, this book is the result of a high-speed collision between my javasrc directory and a documentation framework established for another newcomer language. In O'Reilly's Perl Cookbook, Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington worked out a very successful design, presenting the material in small, focused articles called "recipes." The original model for such a book is, of course, the familiar kitchen cookbook. There is a long history of using the term "cookbook" to refer to an enumeration of how-to recipes relating to computers. On the software side, Donald Knuth applied the "cookbook" analogy to his book The Art of Computer Programming (Addison Wesley), first published in 1968. On the hardware side, Don Lancaster wrote The TTL Cookbook (Sams). (Transistor-transistor logic, or TTL, was the small-scale building block of electronic circuits at the time.) Tom and Nathan worked out a successful variation on this, and I recommend their book for anyone who wishes to, as they put it, "learn more Perl." Indeed, the work you are now reading intends to be a book for the person who wishes to "learn more Java." |
